Anthonares

In case you don’t come to this entry steeped in the space-related blogosphere, suffice it to say that many, many entries have been written about what space advocates need to do to push our cause to the general public. So, to communicate intellectually to an audience what we advocates generally view much more emotionally, we use analogy.

The most popular analogy floating around right now is to relate the NewSpace industries to the beginning of civilian general aviation (this isn’t to ignore the long played-out comparison of space exploration to that of the 15th century New World). The sub-orbital companies are the barnstormers of a century ago, flying for the sake of flying, and opening the public’s eyes to general aviation. Government air-mail contracts of yesteryear become the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) of today. And of course, the maturation of civil aviation into the ubiquitous industry it is today becomes the hope for the future of NewSpace.

Here’s to hoping that analogy is soon retired. As recently noted by self-described NewSpace contrarian David S. Portree, the analogy isn’t any good. Portree views this errant analogy as an overreach–I view it as overly limiting. Instead, I’ll present a new analogy while recognizing that it is imperfect: the advent of spaceflight is very much like that of the boat.

Unfortunately for this new meme, history has not passed to us exactly when the boat was invented, or who did the inventing. And, we don’t know how it changed that culture. But, we do know what it enabled, and that’s where my analogy gets started

Portree is right about his disdain of the general aviation analogy because airplanes really haven’t allowed us to do anything we couldn’t before–at least nothing revolutionary. We can travel faster, ship things more quickly, bomb people more effectively, and reach the Poles in a matter of hours. But, unlike boats, airplanes have not allowed us to exploit the resources of this Earth more effectively.

Boats allowed humans to fish the waters of deep lakes and continental shelves, opening the bounty of the sea to hundreds of generations. Boats gave Australia to the Aboriginees (and later took it away), the Pacific Islands to their so-named residents, and gave the Americas to Europe. The wealth of the world is so much greater because of the access to natural resources made possible by the boat. In comparison, the benefits of aviation make it look like a niche industry.

Spaceflight will be much more like watercraft than aviation because it will allow humans to exploit the resources of our Solar System that were previously inaccessible to us. Imagine, that instead of originating on the great connected landmass of Eurasiafrica, modern humans had arisen on Australia. There, the invention of the boat would have been as important to human history as the invention of fire. It would have expanded the arable land accessible to humans from the paltry few fertile valleys of Australia to the vast plains of central North America and Central Europe, and the far more inviting valleys of the Indus and Yellow Rivers. The world’s first commercially exploitable oil deposits were not found in Australia, but in Pennsylvania. And much of the world’s iron ore and most of its coal are not found down under either.

So, it’s clear that this hypothetical situation would have made for a vastly different history than the one we have now. To make the hypothetical more concrete, we humans are situated on a small island in our great Solar System, and a tiny insignificant speck in the broader Universe. The resources of this planet, while vast and precious, pale in comparison to those of the Solar System at large. Most of the water in the Solar System is found outside our planet, some of which conveniently visits our neck of the woods every so often in cometary form. The nickel and iron stores of the asteroid belt exceed even the finest ores of Earth in quantity and quality by an incomparable margin. The energy available to us from the Sun is unlimited, and harvesting it completely without negative consequences–unlike every single form of currently exploitable energy here at home.

We have grown up on Earth, on our small island, and as such we have a hard time as a species accepting anything else as reality. But so too, would those hypothetical native Australians before the invention of the boat. The vast tropical forests and lush plains would have been all but imaginable. And why would they need iron, coal, and oil if they had plentiful game to hunt and tallow for candles? The humans that look back at the Earth from their homes elsewhere in the Solar System may, too, look at our shortsightedness and wonder. But, they won’t wonder what enabled their existence, and that of their vastly more populous and prosperous society–the invention of spaceflight.